10YEARS Festival Performances

Over the course of three days, and across EMPAC’s four main venues and public spaces, the 10YEARS celebration marked a decade since the building's opening in 2008 by presenting a diverse offering of cross-disciplinary performances spanning music, dance, theater, film, and many experiential spaces in between. Five of these performances were newly commissioned by EMPAC, developed over a year through the artist-in-residence program, and made their world premiere that weekend.

10YEARS featured works by:
Formosa Quartet
Trajal Harrell
Maria Hassabi
Moved by the Motion (Wu Tsang and boychild with Patrick Belaga, 
Josh Johnson, and Asma Maroof)
Olga Neuwirth and International Contemporary Ensemble
Isabelle Pauwels
Yara Travieso

In addition to the lineup of performances and installations, events included a research demonstration by the Cognitive and Immersive Systems Laboratory (CISL), a talk on digital archiving strategies by EMPAC Director Johannes Goebel, and an address by Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson preceding an Ambisonic performance in the Concert Hall.

Joseph Haydn, String Quartet in E-flat major, Op.76 No.6,  2nd movement (1796/97)

Franz Joseph Haydn is said to be the “Father of string quartets.” The tradition of the string quartet is thought to have started in his hands.

Béla Bartók, String Quartet No. 4, 5th movement (1927)

Studio 1 is the space with the shortest reverberation time of all the venues. The audience sits in circles close to the string quartet in the center. The proximity of musicians and audience, the acoustics of the space, and the driving intensity of the music create heat. It’s hardly imaginable that this music was composed almost 100 years ago and only five quarters of a century later than the Haydn piece. 

Johann Sebastian Bach, Die Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XIV

Studio 2 is set up the opposite way to Studio 1; the audience sits in circles facing outwards, and each of the musicians is positioned at the center of one of the four walls. The Art of the Fugue was composed in the last decade of Bach’s life, between 1740–50. It’s an ongoing debate for which instruments it was composed, if intended for any specific instruments at all. This last fugue Bach wrote was left unfinished and, in this performance, it will end with the last bar Bach wrote. A fugue is a highly specific framework where the voices are independent and joint at the same time. Positioning the string quartet spatially around the audience spins the musical lines through the volume of the studio, so they meet in the space of each audience member.

There are many themes in choreographer Trajal Harrell’s oeuvre: modernism and postmodernism, minimalism, vogue, the fashion runway, pedestrianism, gender, and butoh (Japanese dance theater), to name a few. Complex layers of history and references relating to each theme are crafted into every moment of Harrell’s choreography, from props and costumes to sweeping physical gestures and micro-facial expressions. In the Mood for Frankie is no exception. The work focuses on the idea of the muse, a source of inspiration. Not surprisingly, this focus might come in part from Harrell’s own muses, butoh co-founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, who maintained a strong relationship to their muse, Argentine-born Spanish dancer Antonia Merce.

Harrell’s other influences include modern dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, fashion designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, singer Sade, and butoh artist Yoko Ashikawa. Among these are Harrell’s closest muses, dancers Thibault Lac and Ondrej Vidlar, who emerge, re-emerge, and emerge again throughout Harrell’s works and who perform In the Mood for Frankie live with Harrell. These figures, their work, and their connections to one another — or sometimes lack thereof—have left an indelible mark on the context and aesthetics of Harrell’s choreography. With his cross-historical web of influences, Harrell transcends time and place in favor of an imagined and constructed performance landscape that delivers a new aesthetic apparition.

While themes consistent with Harrell’s oeuvre take center stage in In the Mood for Frankie, this work also highlights a new exploration for Harrell. With artistic collaborator Stéfane Perraud, Harrell delves into the world of projection. Used here as a light source and an aesthetic backdrop, slowly moving marble patterns are projected onto the dancers and their platforms. The virtual presence of digital material feels fitting for Harrell’s work, where inspirational specters abound. Here, the virtuality of spectrality and digitality collide.

—Ashley Ferro-Murray, Curator

Time-based arts stand at the center of this celebration. There is the time an art work takes to unfold and engage us. There is the time our senses take to perceive a work, and there is our inner time of experience. Then there is the sliced and diced time of computer processing and the time of rapidly changing technolo­gies driven by the economic system.

Over thousands of years, humans have carved into stone, painted on canvas, printed words in books, and captured images on film in order to pass informa­tion down the chain of generations. With digital data storage, we have reached the point where what is precious to individuals, families, and institutions will only last for a fraction of a generation without constant care and maintenance. 

Digital technology depends on clocks. They depend on complex technological environments, electricity, chips, air conditioning, and are doomed by changing hardware, operating systems, applications, and data formats. Even if we have electricity and computers 100 years from now, what we have stored and hoped to pass along will be lost and forgotten without continuous, meticulous invest­ment of time and money.
 
At EMPAC, we have created hundreds of events, commissions, and new works that are part of the larger cultural record. We have over 500 videos documenting these time-based productions accessible via the EMPAC Archive Chair. If EM­PAC was shuttered tomorrow, this video documentation would quickly disap­pear without the funds and the interest needed to preserve them. As a result, EMPAC is researching an affordable digital time capsule that an individual or an institution can create with a snap-shot of images, texts, sounds, and docu­ments to be accessible for the next 100 years. 


—Johannes Goebel, Director

Lost Highway Suite by Olga Neuwirth is a composition for a large ensemble of musicians, six soloists, and live electronics, with many loudspeakers surrounding the audience. The suite is drawn from the orchestral parts of Neuwirth’s 2003 opera Lost Highway, the libretto of which was co-written by Austrian Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek and inspired by the film of the same name by David Lynch and Barry Gifford. 


The suite consists of instrumental sections from the opera that the composer has tied together into one piece. The opera and its libretto set the tone and atmosphere for this composition, but there is no direct link between the film and the suite. However, the film, opera, and suite share a common structural approach. Rather than pursuing narrative continuity and evolution, different musical tableaus and sonic spaces are established, which then mutate, and change into one another, almost like cuts between different scenes in a film. 

Six soloists (saxophone, clarinet, trombone, guitar, accordion, and keyboards) are positioned behind the ensemble and channeled to the live electronic system, the output of which is then fed to the loudspeakers. Originally, the suite was performed with a ring of loudspeakers surrounding the audience. The performance at EMPAC utilized a 64-loudspeaker dome installed in the Concert Hall, for which the electronic part of the composition needed to be reprogrammed. This technology, High-Order Ambisonics, is a refined system for the spatial projection of sound environments that goes beyond traditional stereo or surround sound that we may know from movie theaters. 

—Johannes Goebel

The narrative structure of Sudden Rise is influenced by Shakespearean tragedy and alludes to the dramaturgical specificity that the proscenium stage implies. At the same time, it works against these conditions, committed to an improvisatory and epistolary process as each artist interprets their own role in relation to each other. boychild and Josh Johnson perform an endless duet in multiplication with each other and themselves as pre-recorded images, reimagining the early days of cinema when projections shared the stage with theatrical performers. The classical tradition that resonates from Patrick Belaga’s cello intertwines with the electronic repetition of Tsang and boychild’s voices looped and repeated by Asma Maroof, and the chiaroscuro lighting of baroque portraiture is diffused against digital architectures, spatial grids, and test patterns that continually reform the time and perspective on stage.  

Sudden Rise stages trauma as not only tragedy but also as a site of remaking through the unending and entangled formations of Blackness and queerness. Through direct contact between performers, words, and music, Sudden Rise makes visible how this spatial, oral, and haptic communication takes form. It visualizes how gestures, languages, and techniques are inherited and reproduced, and it imagines a new dimension in which deep historical memory and contemporary bodies are entwined and processed on stage. 

—Vic Brooks, Curator

Stillness and slowness are at the center of artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi’s practice. As she explained in an interview for the Walker Art Center, early in her career Hassabi had an impulse for live performances to stop so that she could look at them. Since then, Hassabi’s choreography features extremely, sometimes imperceptibly, slow moving dancers. In this work, she has not stopped the live performance, per se, but instead slowed it down such that we can all consider it in form and detail. This choreography first consists of an encounter with a seemingly still dancer or group of dancers. It becomes clear over time that these dancers slowly move their bodies very precisely from one position to another. As the choreography progresses, a complexity of formations emerge with bodies moving together to create shapes and moving apart to reveal empty space. 

In 2016/17, Hassabi created a performative diptych titled STAGED? and STAGING, which shared an aesthetic, similar costumes, sound scores and movement material, yet were arranged in different structures to fit the context of their presentations. Both of these works also shared a now-iconic set: a large expanse of pink carpet. STAGED? is set in a traditional black box theater space. The audience sits in risers on the carpet surrounding the performers who move in the center of the space with concentrated theatrical lighting above them. This work has a beginning and an end. At a certain point the doors to the theater close to signal the start of the performance and at the end the doors open and the audience leaves together. The live installation, STAGING, on the other hand, was created for exhibition spaces. Performers move in places that the public navigates more freely than they would from a static seat in a traditional performance space. Here, the encounter with Hassabi’s dancers is more surprising. The audience wonders: is this a statue, is the person lying on the floor in need, or, is this in fact a piece of live performance? Together, STAGED? and STAGING highlight the distinction between performance in a theatrical space and performance in an exhibition space. 

It is somehow fitting, then, that Hassabi expresses interest in another time-based art: moving image. SlowMeDown is Hassabi’s second moving-image installation and is designed for exhibition spaces. Working with video editing technologies and the live documentation of STAGING, Hassabi has the capacity to zoom in and accentuate her choreographic interests more precisely than was possible in a live performance setting. Editing a moving image has enabled her to elongate stillness beyond the physical capacity of her dancers and for formal elements like color to be abstracted and exaggerated with the addition of post-production elements including collage and animation. 

Spatially, Hassabi’s installation continues her exploration of the self-reflexive encounter with unexpectedly still or slowly dancing body in a museum. This time, however, the audience follows the expanse of pink carpet from the physical space of Studio 2 into the mediated space of the screen that stands in its center, where Hassabi’s footage of the carpet and choreography extends back into the physical reality where her viewers sit and watch. 

Hassabi thinks of SlowMeDown as a hyperreal frame for her work. This Baudrillardian push feels not like an extension of her previous work, where the slowed-down dancer brought an uncanny focus to the performative frame, but instead like a new study into the mechanics of reproducibility.

—Ashley Ferro-Murray, Curator

Throughout the 10YEARS Celebration, guests were invited to explore an audio installation one can only experience at EMPAC. EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) loudspeaker array is the only such system in the USA, and we are not aware that any system of this quality exists anywhere else in the world. Using an interactive touchscreen, the installation allows visitors to step through a sequence of listening demonstrations, featuring recordings of classical music by Mozart and a Tango with three guitars and a singer, that will immerse you into a new world of sound.

Creating spatialized audio, the experience of music or other sonic events happening in front of and around us, has been an endeavor for engineers since the advent of stereo (with two speakers) and surround sound (with four, five, or many more loudspeakers). This interest started in 1881 with the first two-channel transmission over telephone lines, and many different technologies improving upon the effect have been created up to the present day. Some might remember the stereo record, or even a vinyl record capable of reproducing four channels of audio. A similar effect was possible with tape recorders that played multiple tracks out through individual loudspeakers.

Composers in the 1950s started to produce pieces for more than two loudspeakers and have since composed many pieces using any combination and number of loudspeakers distributed in space. In 1958 the architect Le Corbusier and the composer Edgar Varese created the Phillips Pavilion for the World Expo in Brussels, an extraordinary building in which more than 400 loudspeakers projected Varese’s Poème électronique through space. At the end of the 1960s, the American composer John Chowning developed the first computer program at Stanford University to simulate moving sound sources with four loudspeakers on the first online computer music system.

Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) has a very different approach and result. First theorized by acousticians in the 1980s, WFS differs from other systems in that the sound source will stay put in its location independent of where the listener is positioned. In stereo or surround sound, there is a “sweet spot” where the sounds are perceived in balance. But once one moves around or sits closer to one speaker, the listening experience shifts like a lopsided ship to the speakers one sits closest to. There have been several WFS systems constructed and research has been conducted continuously over the course of the years. But artists were never really convinced of the effect that the theory promised. 

EMPAC’s high-density modular WFS system was designed and constructed in 2016 and is one of the most extensive systems of its kind. Consisting of 18 modules, each with 31 small loudspeakers situated very closely together and producing its own signal, the system can be used in a range of applications, from concert and theatrical settings to the simulation of acoustical environments for research purposes. With this platform, EMPAC has demonstrated the full power of WFS and is one of the very few studios in the world actively developing new creative work for WFS. 

In this installation, we used recorded classical music to demonstrate the system’s unique effect. However, we are more interested in using its capabilities for the production of new acoustic-musical works, which could not be realized otherwise. Furthermore, the system will be used for research in the areas of immersive environments and telepresence. The EMPAC curatorial program is currently commissioning artists and composers to explore this potential.